The helmet came first, and it was not even hers. Susan Dietrich, born in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1948 to a pianist mother and a violist father, hitchhiked into San Francisco's counterculture around 1968 and married a man named Joel Dunsany who dreamed of playing rock and roll alone on a street corner wearing a silver helmet with white wings and a flashing red light. He never worked up the nerve. She did, and she wore his helmet to do it, and that detail explains this record better than any genre label.
She started on Boston sidewalks in the late 1970s with an accordion. When it was stolen, she replaced it with a Casiotone MT-40, a battery-powered keyboard with preset rhythms and a thin, chirping tone nobody mistook for a serious instrument. Run through an Echoplex tape delay along with her voice, it became a small machine haunting itself. From 1984 she worked the Castro and the Haight, and it was the Berkeley Barb that gave her the name after she placed second in its favourite street musician poll.
The Space Lady's Greatest Hits is drawn from a cassette Dunsany assembled by hand in 1990 to sell on the street. The song choices read like a dare. Born to Be Wild, Ballroom Blitz, Fly Like an Eagle and Major Tom were built for volume and swagger, and she strips each down to a lullaby tempo, a wobbling preset beat and a voice that floats somewhere between a hymn and a transmission from orbit. The Electric Prunes' I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) turns from garage-psych panic into something closer to sleep talk. Synthesize Me, which Dunsany wrote for her the moment she swapped the accordion for the Casio, is a slow-motion love song to her equipment and the record's thesis: the machine is the point.
What keeps this from being a novelty is how deliberate the softness is. Where the originals push outward, she pulls inward, and the Echoplex smears each phrase into the next until the arrangements feel less like covers than memories of songs. That instinct places her in the lineage of solo electronic women the documentary Sisters With Transistors traced; Synthesize Me plays over its closing credits.
She quit in 2000, moved back to Colorado and became a nurse. Irwin Chusid put her Electric Prunes cover on his 2002 outsider compilation Songs in the Key of Z, and in 2012 her second husband, the songwriter Eric Schneider, challenged her to play Ghost Riders in the Sky for him on the old gear. London's Night School Records released Greatest Hits in 2013, a first world tour followed in 2014, and Mississippi Records reissued the album in 2019 after On the Street of Dreams had added Radar Love and Across the Universe to the canon. After Schneider died in 2016, her grandson Skyler Wright took over the touring. She is still out there, helmet on, playing songs everybody knows in a way nobody else has.
